Abstract
Previous studies provided diverging evidence regarding modality specificity of temporal information in short-term memory. Some authors reported modality-specific interference effects on visual and auditory duration discrimination, whereas others observed crossmodal interference effects. One reason for these diverging results could be different trade-offs between the temporal discrimination task and the interference task in these studies. Therefore, this study re-examined these effects with interference tasks (speeded color/pitch change discrimination) that were especially suited to assess potential trade-offs between the primary and the secondary tasks. The results showed that the auditory interference task selectively impaired discrimination performance for auditory durations, whereas the visual interference task proved to be inefficient as interference task. The present results agree best with an account that suggests a modality-specific representation of temporal information in short-term memory.
Highlights
How is temporal information encoded and maintained in short-term memory? Contemporary timing theories imply three different hypotheses regarding this question
Temporal information might be primarily encoded in the auditory system, because the auditory system is especially suited for temporal processing (Welch & Warren, 1980)
The results showed that visual tracking selectively impaired short-term memory of visual durations, and articulatory suppression selectively impaired short-term memory of auditory durations
Summary
How is temporal information encoded and maintained in short-term memory? Contemporary timing theories imply three different hypotheses regarding this question. Internal clock models (Creelman, 1962; Gibbon, Church, & Meck, 1984; Treisman, 1963) suggest an abstract and amodal representation (Rammsayer & Ulrich, 2005; Wearden, Todd, & Jones, 2006), that is, the number of signals elicited by an internal pacemaker during a certain time interval represent the duration of this interval. An important source of evidence regarding these hypotheses comes from studies investigating modality-specific interference effects on short-term memory of temporal information In one of these studies, Rattat and Picard (2012) presented unimodal (visual vs auditory) and bimodal (visual-auditory) durations. The results showed that visual tracking selectively impaired short-term memory of visual durations, and articulatory suppression selectively impaired short-term memory of auditory durations The authors interpreted this selective interference pattern as evidence for a modality-specific representation of duration information
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